I'm passionate about building things the right way.
Craftsmanship matters. Every whole is the sum of a thousand details—so it's important to get the details right.
Hiding Wordpress page links
When developing a custom Wordpress theme, it's necessary to provide prev/next navigation wherever there might be more than one page of posts: the main index, search results pages, and archive pages, for example.
posts_nav_link() provides the simplest way to do this—it automatically displays either or both of the links, as needed. If you need more control over the markup, next_posts_link() and previous_posts_link() let you display them independently.
New look! Same great taste!
If you've been here before, you'll notice that things just got a bit spiffier.
There are still some layout quirks in Internet Explorer—I'm working on it.
Let me know what you think!
Check out my new Flash game site
If you find yourself with a few minutes to kill, check out Plastic Lounge, my new Flash gaming site. There are already hundreds of free games available, and I have hundreds more to add as time allows.
Honest feedback is always welcome—it helps me to provide a better site. Hope you find something you like!
The $300,000,000 Button
If you think that usability, information architecture, and user experience design are made-up disciplines for lily-gilding aesthetes, with little practical bearing on your Web site, think again.
Jared Spool explains how changing one button in a site's checkout process increased sales by $300 million per year. (He doesn't name the retailer in the article, but it starts with "A" and ends with "mazon.com".)
Ellipses and interrobangs and em-dashes, oh my!
Typography is one of the most overlooked aspects of Web design—and I'm not talking about fonts, kerning, and x-heights. I'm talking about proper use of glyphs—the individual letters, numerals, and (especially) punctuation marks that make up all written text. There are proper and improper ways to use each glyph—and even large, well-funded websites often get it wrong.
This isn't surprising—even if a site's designer is trained in the specialized discipline of typography (which is unlikely), the person who actually marks up the content (or pastes it into the content management system) probably isn't. But the fact remains that poor typography is one of the most common and most easily avoided blemishes on the web.
Password Security for Web Applications 101
User registration and login is a standard feature on interactive Web sites, and passwords are the standard way to protect those accounts. But a password is only effective as long as it's kept secret—and you might not be doing everything you can to protect yours.
Let's say you've finished building the HTML and the server-side validation code for your registration form, and you're now ready to write the code which stores the user's information (probably in a database). How should you handle the password?
Conditional comments for iPhone
You're probably familiar with IE's conditional comments. They allow us to feed special code to that special browser to overcome its many bugs and deficiencies.
Is there something similar for iPhone? Not exactly, but we can achieve the same end:
<!--[if !IE]><!--> <link media="only screen and (max-device-width: 480px)" href="iphone.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" /> <!--<![endif]-->
Simulating HTML5's placeholder attribute with jQuery
I recently discussed the placeholder attribute in HTML5. Today, I needed exactly such a behavior for a site I'm working on, so I knocked together a reusable, unobtrusive solution with jQuery.
Forms in HTML5
The HTML5 spec continues to grind inexorably toward publication. I've just spent a while with the latest draft, and at least with respect to forms, I like what I see. Here's a roundup.
Toward Better Buttons
I see this a lot:
<input type="submit" class="button" value="Save Changes" />Because the <input /> element can represent many things other than a button—and because many browsers still don't support attribute selectors, such as input[type=button]—the author has added class="button" for the sole purpose of giving the stylesheet something to match on.
May I suggest a better way?